{"id":408947,"date":"2026-04-24T17:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T17:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/408947\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T17:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T17:38:12","slug":"a-dystopian-take-on-school-shootings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/408947\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dystopian Take on School Shootings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of us bullied as children may have had a fantasy about enacting bittersweet revenge on those who wronged us \u2014 but hopefully nothing quite as violently disturbing as the fantasy that plays out in Todd Wiseman Jr.\u2019s queasy, upsetting \u201cThe School Duel<\/a>.\u201d In this movie, the foaming compulsion toward school shootings in young people is sublimated into a spectator sport: a Florida State-mandated, fight-to-the-death competition that\u2019s equal parts \u201cThe Purge\u201d and \u201cHunger Games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turn on American news coverage any day, and you\u2019re likely to tune into the story of a mass shooting \u2014 an epidemic that\u2019s become as quintessential to the United States as apple pie. Head to your local cineplex, and you\u2019re likely to be reminded of it, too: See A24\u2019s recent \u201cThe Drama<\/a>.\u201d Head to your local opera house (that would be the Metropolitan if you\u2019re in New York), and you\u2019ll see it, too, in the latest interpretation of the dissonant Finnish saga \u201cInnocence,\u201d about a school shooting\u2019s ripple effect on a wedding.<\/p>\n

\"THE<\/a> \"Stephan<\/a> <\/p>\n

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot \u201cThe School Duel<\/a>\u201d is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence. Shot with cold control in black and white by cinematographer Kyle Deitz, Wiseman\u2019s feature debut is a stylish thriller that launched at regional festivals in 2024; what must have seemed near-future about it then seems almost too present-day in 2026. Other than the holographic rectangles that here have replaced phones as handheld doomscrolling devices, \u201cThe School Duel<\/a>\u201d is harrowingly close to our own world. Here, nationalism and religion rule the day in a Florida where gun control has been entirely abolished \u2014 did I say this was speculative fiction?<\/p>\n

Wiseman packs a lot of ambition into the film<\/a>\u2018s compact frames (not only is it shot in a boxy ratio, but the film also runs under a tight 90 minutes) to leave you curious to see what he might do with a bigger canvas.<\/p>\n

Troubled seventh grader Samuel Miller (Kue Lawrence) is a latchkey kid living in an ordinary suburban home with his single mother, Beth (Christina Brucato). Psychologically reeling from the death of his military father, Samuel keeps dad\u2019s dogtags close at hand and with an eventual curiosity toward his assault rifle. Life in middle school (the worst time of any adolescence) isn\u2019t much better. Samuel is tormented in the locker room by his more conventionally, blandly likable classmates \u2014 and it\u2019s that location, coursing with the fear felt by anyone who\u2019s been bullied around gym class, that Wiseman turns into its own kind of warzone. When Samuel finally reacts violently to one more bullying episode, he\u2019s interrogated by an imperious, swan-necked principal (Eugenie Bondurant) who ends up blaming him, not his tormentors, for the incident.<\/p>\n

Looming over it all in this version of Florida is a dystopian answer to school shootings: give the kids an AR-15 and free rein to pick each other off for a day, to channel their anxiety, in the form of arena combat until only one is left standing. In that sense, \u201cThe School Duel\u201d would make a chilling double feature with last year\u2019s \u201cThe Long Walk<\/a>,\u201d the walk-til-you\u2019re-dead Stephen King adaptation about high school boys competing until only one remains alive. (Think of Captain Segmann here, played by Michael Sean Tighe, as the Mark Hamill of it all, meaning not to be trusted.)<\/p>\n

Some boys have been training for years for The School Duel, while others, like Samuel, have been identified as at risk of committing a shooting themselves. Samuel is too comfortable with his father\u2019s assault rifle, pantomiming intimidation into the mirror like a 13-year-old Travis Bickle. The goal of The School Duel he\u2019s conscripted into is to make one boy a king, the rest \u201cmartyrs,\u201d and Samuel is not about to become a martyr.<\/p>\n

Wiseman leaves much in the way of character development at the door, making \u201cThe School Duel\u201d in its second half feel like entering a detached third-person shooter video game, which becomes increasingly distancing the more it tries to be immersive. Equally detached is Oscar Nu\u00f1ez as Governor Anthony \u201cThe Ram\u201d Ramiro, who encourages and supervises the competition. As in \u201cThe Long Walk,\u201d anyone who tries to forfeit The School Duel is promptly killed, heightening the stakes and the boys\u2019 adrenaline in combat. Meanwhile, a gyrating troupe of pom-pommed cheerleaders gleefully chants \u201cshotgun, shotgun, shotgun\u201d as those at home are themselves made to watch and cheer on the duel from the rafters, and on broadcast. (Not Samuel\u2019s mother, who has a different plan.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a charming inconsistency to the performances that at times makes \u201cThe School Duel\u201d feel like a dusted-off lost B-movie from yesteryear, but Lawrence\u2019s turn gets better as it rolls on, as bodies start dropping. There\u2019s no warmth in this movie, which is drained of emotional affect despite the galvanizing filmmaking that potentially promises otherwise. Samuel\u2019s ascension from a boy who simply \u201cqualified\u201d for the duel, and who never fired a gun before, is thinly drawn up to the point where he starts pitching alliances to other fighters. <\/p>\n

Where Wiseman locates emotion is in the use of the camera, the shifts in filmmaking style, especially as the movie, for a brief moment, flips to color. If you want a character piece, don\u2019t look here. If you want to gaze into a cracked mirror that reflects the extreme endgame of ideology, and of our impulses toward violence both fed by and feeding into media consumption, behold \u201cThe School Duel.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll see you in hell, which is better than this shithole state,\u201d one of Samuel\u2019s comrades tells him in his dying breath. State? How about world?<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

Altered Innocence opens \u201cThe School Duel\u201d in select theaters starting Friday, April 24.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those of us bullied as children may have had a fantasy about enacting bittersweet revenge on those who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,878,85,46,397,1530,193283],"class_list":["post-408947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-the-school-duel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}